Searching for Clues to Ancient Carbon Dioxide

<ul><li><p>ture estimates, for example, were based on the assortment of fossils and their isotopic makeup in deep-sea sediments-and they came from only a smattering of points around the globe. To convert them into a mean glo- bal temperature, Hoffert and Covey borrowed a Russian hypothesis of a "universal equa- tion," which describes how temperature var- ies with latitude and thus makes sense of isolated data points. The upshot of this analy- sis was a climate sensitivity of 2.3 degrees Celsius, plus or minus 0.9 degrees. </p><p>On the face of it, that's a big improvement over the uncertain results of the theoretical models. But not everyone is persuaded that the nebulous geological data are strong enough to support Hoffert and Covey's conclusions. "It's a laudable effort, but my feeling is we can't actually use the data that way. The uncertain- ty in the data is as great as the uncertainty in the models," says Crowley. "Premature," says paleoclimatologist Thompson Webb 111 of Brown University, who believes the Russian equation in particular needs more scrutiny. </p><p>Hoffert ~ o i n t s out that he and Covev in- cluded uncertainties in their analysis. And he thinks the ~aleoclimatic data deserve more credit than his critics allow. To those who carp about the data, he suggests: Go out and improve it. "These are all researchable ques- tions. If you set up a research program with the objective of determining paleotempera- ture distribution over the earth over the past 100 million years, you could do it," he says. Indeed, geologists and chemists are already making ;his effort, developing clever new methods to extract information about tem- Derature. carbon dioxide. and other climate factors from mute fossils and rocks (see story on this page). </p><p>Until the past comes into sharper focus, the discipline likely will remain caught be- tween the ambiguity of the historical record and the lack of any other empirical check on the models. But, as in da Vinci's day, there's no doubt that the science of paleoclimatol- ogy is well-suited to a role as pesky devil's advocate, poking holes in accepted theories of how climate works. And no matter how loud the grumbling about fuzzy data, no one's likely to give up on the geological record ariy time soon. For information about how the real planet acts during climate change, the past is the only place to go. </p><p>-Elizabeth Culotta </p><p>Additional Reading M. Hoffefl and C. Covey, "Deriving Global Cli- mate Sensitivity From Paleoclimate Recon- structions," Nature 360, 573 (1 992). COHMAP Members, "Climatic Changes of the Last 18,000 Years: Observations and Model Simulations," Science 241, 1043 (1 988). J. E. Hansen and A.A. Lacis, "Sun and Dust Versus Greenhouse Gases: An Assessment of Their Relative Roles in Global Climate Change," Nature 346,713 (1 990). </p><p>Searching for Clues to Ancient Carbon Dioxide Something on Earth just won't stop fiddling with the thermostat. In the Dast 500 million years, the planet has shivered through ice ages lasting millions of years and sweltered through episodes of global warmth. Clima- tologists, eager to know what keeps jiggling the planet's temperature setting, have focused their suspicions on carbon dioxide, the same heat-trapping gas expected to drive up tem- peratures in coming decades. Catching this suspect in the act has been difficult, how- ever; the atmospheres of millions of years ago are cone with the wind. </p><p>.2 </p><p>But earth scientists are now finding inge- nious ways of reading the record of past car- bon dioxide balances in sedimentary rock and in deep-sea sediment. The techniques are so new that their interpretation remains an uncertain art. "If you read those papers, you see a lot of 'maybes' and 'possiblys,'" says climate modeler David Rind of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies inNew York City. Still, the results published in the past 2 years have generally been heartening for research- ers who think the gas has been a key driver of climate change. Although there are some puzzling exceptions, the fingerprints of high carbonhioxide are all oversome of the warmest periods in geologi- cal history, and its grip seems to relax during global cooling. </p><p>If the results can be firmed up, says marine geochemist Michael Arthur of Pennsylvania State Uni- versity, they'll give a boost to re- searchers' understanding of past climates. And thev mav also h e l ~ r r climatologists forecast future cli- mate change. "We'd all like to </p><p>u </p><p>place constraints on future global warming by using paleoclimate," says James Kasting, also of Penn- </p><p>processes that pump carbon dioxide into the air. such as volcanic activitv. and Drocesses </p><p>, . </p><p>that extract it, such as the weathering of cer- tain rocks and the deposition of plant matter. Based on what's known about how these pro- cesses have varied over Earth's history, Berner calculated a theoretical carbon diox- ide curve for the past 600 million years. The curve matches the climate record at several key points: It dips low during the great ice age of the Carboniferous and Permian ~eriods. about 300 million years ago, for example, and rises to a high in the Cretaceous. </p><p>u </p><p>To researchers who had been struggling to explain the climate's ups and downs, those matchups were "really pretty impressive," says Thomas J. Crowley of Applied Research Corp. in College Station, Texas. Although some climate researchers, including Goddard's Rind, argue that changes in ocean currents may have played a bigger role in past climate changes, Berner's results encouraged Crowley and others to consider carbon dioxide a prime susDect. And now the curve has become a point of reference for many of the carbon dioxide detectives-a theory to confirm or deny. Says Thure Cerling, a geologist at the </p><p>s~ivania State university. If cli- Written in stone. Carbonates deposited around tree roots mate modelers could say just how 300 million years ago may trace ancient carbon dioxide. much carbon dioxide it took to, say, warm the globe by 6 to 12 degrees Cel- University ofUtah, "Berner has nicely put up sius, as happened about 100 million years ago something for other people to shoot at." during the middle of the Cretaceous period, Cerling himself has been taking aim at Ber- they might be able to offer better predictions. ner's theory, and so far it has stood up well. </p><p>Behind this fascination with ancient car- Cerling has been reconstructing the CO, bon dioxide, say climatologists, is the realiza- content of the ancient atmosphere by study- tion, some 10 years old, that atmospheric ing fossil soil-in particular, the veins and carbon dioxide can rise and fall manyfold nodules of carbonate minerals that formed in over geological time. Getting credit for much the soil from carbon dioxide diffusing from the of this consciousness raising are geochemist atmosphere or plant roots. His method relies Robert Bemer of Yale University and his col- on the fact that carbon from each source leagues. They showed how long-termchanges wears a badge of its origin: a specific mixture in COz can result from the shifting balance of of carbon- 12 and the less abundant isotope SCIENCE VOL. 259 12 FEBRUARY 1993 </p></li><li><p>carbon-13. Many plants, for example, take up and release "light" CO,, containing a smaller fraction of carbon-13 than the atmosphere. By analyzing the isotopes in a carbonate sam- ple, Cerling can estimate what fraction of the carbon must have come from the plants-and what fraction came from the atmosphere. </p><p>Going on to estimate the actual level of - CO, in the atmosphere, cautions Cerling, reauires assum~tions about how much car- bon dioxide the plants were pumping into the ancient soil. Adding to the uncertaintv is </p><p>- </p><p>the possibility that the isotopic signatures of plants and the atmosphere have shifted over geological time."It's a dark glass we're look- ing through," Cerling concedes. </p><p>But Cerling says that the general drift of his results is immune to changes in assump- tions. "For some of the Cretaceous soils I've been working on, no matter what your as- sumptions, everything ends up pointing to- ward high C02," more than six times the Dresent level. Soils dating from the Dast k0 million years, a time ofugenerally coker climates, point to much lower C02-about twice the present-day level or less. </p><p>Choosy plankton. The pattern is roughly in line with what Berner predicted. And a similar trend is emerging in results from a very different quarter: the deep sea. Like land plants, the ocean's one-celled green plants, or phytoplankton, are choosy about the form of carbon dioxide they take up. But unlike land plants, which are thought to take in roughly the same isotopic mixture whatever the level in the atmosphere, the phytoplankton's in- take depends on how much carbon dioxide is available. "When there's less C 0 2 around, the plankton can't afford to be choosy," ex- plains marine geochemist Kate Freeman of Penn State. As a result, the mixture of carbon isotopes in sea-floor organic matter should track the amount of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean when the plants were alive-a clue to gas's abundance in the atmosphere. </p><p>That realization goes back to the 1970s, savs Arthur of Penn State. Various technical prbblerns kept researchers from exploiting this record until recently, and even now it's fraught with uncertainties. But in the past couple of years, researchers including Arthur and his colleagues have tried to read it. Arthur and, independently, Freeman and John Hayes of Indiana Universitv have come UD with deep-sea histories of carbon dioxide for the ~ a s t 120 million to 140 million vears that show roughly the same pattern as Cerling's data. Arthur says he "definitely sees a [carbon dioxide] hump between 120 and 80 million vears ago." followed bv a decline. "But whether </p><p>- . </p><p>the peak was four or 10 times the present, we don't know." Freeman and Hayes also see a decline, but the initial hump was smaller- no more than four times the present level. </p><p>The reappearance of the same pattern re- assures Berner: "Qualitatively, I'm happy," </p><p>he says. The quantitative inconsistencies among the results, he says, have so far kept him from using them to tinker with his model. "But if the soil people and the marine people can agree, then I can start refining my model." </p><p>Berner and other theorists are also eager to see the techniques extended to key points in the climate record well before the Creta- ceous hothouse. For example, says Berner, "what we need now are measurements for the Permo-Carboniferous glaciation [300 million years ago]," when he believes carbon dioxide fell to a low after an earlier peak. </p><p>A pair of researchers at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville is already planning a test. Geologists Claudia Mora and Steven Driese are applying Cerling's technique to soils from the Carboniferous and Permian, and they expect to have carbon dioxide esti- mates within the next few months. "If [they] come out with high CO,, I'll have to do a lot of head scratching," says Berner. But Mora says the early indications are that he may get off easy. Analyzing samples even older than the Carboniferous, she and Driese saw a steep decline from levels more than 10 times higher than today in the Silurian period some 400 million years ago to three to five times high- er in the Devonian, immediately before the glacial episode. Says Mora, "The models and the C 0 2 results are in the same ballpark." </p><p>Still, these techniques for taking whiffs of the ancient atmosphere don't always bolster the case for carbon dioxide as the major driver of climate change. Take the oldest soil stud- ied to date, from the late Ordovician period, 440 million years ago. Instead of soil carbon- ates, geologists Crayton Yapp and Harald Poths of the University of New Mexico looked at a mineral known as goethite, which snares traces of C 0 2 from plants and the atmos- phere in its crystal structure. By an analytical technique much like Cerling's, Yapp and Poths estimated that the Ordovician atmo- </p><p>sphere had 16 times today's carbon dioxide- more than enough, one might think, to heat the climate to tro~ical levels. Yet the late Or- dovician was a time of extensive glaciation. </p><p>While Yapp and Poths come up with too much carbon dioxide in an ancient ice age, marine geochemists Maureen Raymo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Gregory Rau of the University of California, Santa Cruz, looking at a more recent warm period, find too little. Raymo says she and Rau decided to focus on the Pliocene epoch, about 3.5 million years ago, in part because "people say this is a greenhouse world." Half the Antarctic ice sheet had melted, and temperate conditions prevailed at lati- tudes that are arctic today. To stoke that kind of warmth. Crowlev and other model- ers had estimated, the atmosphere may have held twice as much carbon dioxide as today. Far from it, Raymo announced at last December's American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco: Based on the ma- rine method, she and Raufound that Pliocene carbon dioxide was about the same as today's. </p><p>To Rind, of NASA Goddard, such results iust eo to show that it's too soon to declare , " </p><p>the carbon dioxide case closed. But he agrees that, in Kasting's words, "if you really could make the CO, record quantitative, it could be very important." Only then might clima- tologists finally be able to say why the an- cient atmosphere blew hot and cold-and which way it will go in the future. </p><p>-Tim Appenzeller </p><p>Additional Readings T. Cerling, "Carbon Dioxide in the Atmosphere: Evidence From Cenozoic and Mesozoic Paleosols," American Journal of Science 291, 377 (1991). K.H. Freeman and J. H. Hayes, "Fractionation of Carbon Isotopes by Phytoplankton and Esti- mates of Ancient CO, Levels," Global Bio- geochemical Cycles 6,185 (1 992). </p><p>SCIENCE VOL. 259 12 FEBRUARY 1993 </p></li></ul>